A Canadian study at three Canadian universities has revealed that women who are trained to prevent sexual assault for self-defense are less likely to be victims the next year.

Under a training program, first-year college women are taught to resist sexual assault. The study conducted on women indulging in self-defense training showed a reduction in risk of completed rape during their first year of school. The study's strong results would encourage more universities to offer the training program.

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the University of Windsor. Results are in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. For the study, researchers recruited more than 800 female students, aged 17-24 from the three universities.

A control group of 442 women were assigned to a session where they were given access to brochures on sexual assault while the other 451 women were assigned to receive a training program that included four three-hour sessions on recognizing danger, resisting pressure to have sex, and physical self-defense.

The program was developed by study leader, psychologist Charlene Senn at the University of Windsor.

Participants took an online survey largely developed by University of Arizona psychologist Mary Koss was one year after training ended. Their responses were grouped as completed rape, attempted rape, sexual coercion, attempted coercion or nonconsensual sexual contact.

The researchers who received the resistance training were less fell victim to completed rape than the control group. The women in training group reported with 5.2% self-reporting victimization vs. 9.8% in the control group.

The risk reduction was even greater for attempted rape, with a ratio of 3.4% in the group who got the training, compared with 9.3% in the group who did not.